Addressing the Issue of Infrastructure Sprawl

ADDRESSING THE ISSUE OF INFRASTRUCTURE SPRAWL June 2009

WHITE PAPER

Copyright (c) 2009 robertkeahey.com - All rights reserved

CONTENTS Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Infrastructure Sprawl - The Ongoing Problem ........................................................................................................ 2 Responding to Industry Upheaval .......................................................................................................................... 3 Tackle the Problem Head-on - But do It in an Orderly Fashion................................................................................ 4 Be Realistic about the Problem You are Solving ................................................................................................. 4 Leverage the Power and Value of Frameworks and Methodologies .................................................................... 5 Build a Trusted Data Source - A Critical First Step in Addressing Infrastructure Sprawl ....................................... 5 Overcome the Limitations of Current Infrastructure Management Methods and Tools ...................................... 7 Maximize the Value of your Shrinking IT Budget ............................................................................................... 7 Example Architecture Model.................................................................................................................................. 8 Summary ............................................................................................................................................................. 10 About robertkeahey.com ......................................................................................................................................11

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Imagine a scenario where you, the IT director for a major corporation, are called to a board of directors meeting to present how you ensure Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. A recent inquiry by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has shown that your company's accounting and auditing procedures may not be sufficient to create a complete and accurate inventory of corporate assets. Now it's your turn to show that you have control of the IT environment. Are you prepared?

In many cases the answer is "yes". Unfortunately, in far too many situations the answer is "no" or "I'm not sure" not good responses when you are standing in the board room.

Ensuring that you can give a positive response to the question of asset and inventory accuracy requires that you have a clear view and direct line of sight to all the elements that make up your IT service delivery capability. In the era of the "glass house" and mainframes this was fairly easy. But in today's mixed modal landscape of mainframes, distributed systems, virtualization, mobility and cloud computing this is becoming increasingly difficult - and customers are making it worse by demanding more self-provisioned services.

The first step to taking control of infrastructure sprawl is not simply about "automation". It's about creating a strategy around developing and executing a plan of attack centered around understanding the problems you are solving and then building the capability to produce end-to-end visibility of your IT environment and identifying the critical elements that support your business. Once control of your IT environment has been established, then you can reap the benefits of automation.

This white paper is the first in a series that takes a look at the steps to creating a business relevant IT infrastructure. It focuses on strategy, architecture and design as opposed to products and tools. Those are unique to each IT environment, but the framework for successfully taming infrastructure sprawls is common to all.

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INFRASTRUCTURE SPRAWL - THE ONGOING PROBLEM •

The advent of virtualization at all layers of the infrastructure introduces new levels of complexity in developing a complete and accurate infrastructure topology picture

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The hype associated with cloud computing results in mixed IT service delivery models, further exacerbating the problem of disjointed architectures and infrastructure sprawl

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The forecast for accelerated reconstruction of business IT infrastructure will outpace the capabilities of legacy management systems

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The merger and acquisition frenzy is driving the need for both business and IT rationalization, increasing the demand for tools that can quickly and accurately discover and correlate complex IT environments

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The time and expense associated with large enterprise product testing and integration cycles are prohibitive

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IT industry convergence among the large legacy providers in causing fear, uncertainty and doubt with respect to platform strategies

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IT budgets have shrunk to the point where only large enterprises can afford big legacy solutions, and many of those enterprises are rethinking their purchasing decisions

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RESPONDING TO INDUSTRY UPHEAVAL The Information Technology (IT) industry is undergoing dramatic change. The global economic crisis has significantly changed the business landscape, and the trickle-down effect has sent shockwaves through the entire business infrastructure. Chief Information Officers and IT Operations Managers are now faced with unparalleled challenges: Maintaining service levels for existing systems while dramatically reducing operational support costs Accelerating the development of new capabilities to provide first-mover advantage - in the midst of continually shifting markets Managing the requirements of internal business units as they seek more responsive, lower cost alternatives for their business systems and applications hosting services Integrating disparate IT infrastructures that result from the frantic pace of mergers and acquisitions some of which are now mandated by government intervention Responding to never-before-seen levels of compliance reporting as lenders, government agencies, oversight committees and shareholders require more detailed and more frequent visibility Sorting through the hype of the latest technological wave as vendors miraculously "reinvent" themselves overnight to be the latest and greatest cloud-computing provider All of these challenges have resulted in a clearly identifiable and disturbing trend - IT infrastructure sprawl has gotten worse, and is accelerating at an unhealthy pace. The promise of virtualization has yet to be realized. Many of the advantages of virtualization are apparent - consolidation of applications onto larger, faster hardware platforms and increased utilization of existing IT assets. But at the same time, the ability to "spool up" new server instances "on demand" has created a wave of virtual server sprawl that is now outpacing the levels associated with physical servers observed over the last 10 years. The effects of this sprawl can be significant: Loss of visibility to your infrastructure assets resulting in audit and regulatory non-compliance Financial and legal exposure due to lack of software license management Increased resource requirements as a result of unauthorized or unwarranted server instances Significant business impact resulting from ill-defined and poorly understood application delivery environments Unwarranted customer dissatisfaction resulting from poor performance of unmanaged, self-provisioned systems Rapidly growing server "farms" that stretch the limits of legacy tools built on "top down" management models If left unchecked the effects of uncontrolled physical and virtual infrastructure sprawl can result in significant unplanned costs, decreased service levels and loss of credibility with your customers - both internal and external.

Preventing infrastructure sprawl begins with obtaining a clear picture of what you currently have running in your data center. Without this understanding it will be impossible to gain control of your environment - which is essential for building a robust and manageable physical and virtual infrastructure.

The time to act is now.

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TACKLE THE PROBLEM HEAD-ON - BUT DO IT IN AN ORDERLY FASHION Electronic Data Systems, a global information technology outsourcing company, aired a television commercial a few years back that featured an airplane being constructed in mid-flight. The premise of the commercial was that in today's fast-paced world you don't have the luxury of taking your business "offline" to retool it. You must redesign, re-engineer and rebuild your operations as you continue to deliver your current products and services to the customers who are currently paying your bills. This same scenario applies to addressing the problem of infrastructure sprawl - you simply cannot hit the pause button on your IT service delivery while you create and execute a strategy for taking control of your infrastructure. You must implement methods, processes and tools "on the fly" without impacting your current operations and living within business-dictated performance and budgetary constraints.

In order to ensure success of any project you must identify strategies that support the overall mission of the organization and tactics that give you ability to achieve incremental goals. Otherwise your efforts to control infrastructure sprawl will turn into "project sprawl". A few key areas underpin all the other activities and must be given careful consideration before you start your journey to a well understood and well managed business relevant infrastructure.

BE REALISTIC ABOUT THE PROBLEM YOU ARE SOLVING Unfortunately for most IT managers, the issues outlined earlier in this white paper are just a few of the overwhelming number of challenges with which they are faced with on any given day. Dealing with all of the issues at once is an impossible task - you must focus on those that provide the greatest return on investment.

Once you choose which problems you are going to tackle, you must ensure that you have a clear understanding of what the expected outcome will be.

Infrastructure sprawl is a big issue with many constantly moving parts. All too often IT managers assume that "automation" will solve their problems, reduce costs and improve service - all at the same time. Solving infrastructure sprawl is not just about automation, but rather gaining control of your environment, which then provides the starting point for true automation and value added services. As the old saying goes, "if you try to automate a mess you end up with an automated mess". To gain control of your environment you must choose the strategy that will address the greatest number of issues and provide the greatest return - here are a few to consider depending on your environment: Inventory for compliance management and reporting - if unmanaged growth is currently not your most pressing problem, but you need to ensure that you are compliant with government or governance reporting requirements.

Licensing management for risk mitigation - if you are experiencing significant physical and virtual resource growth and you need to manage your exposure to potentially improperly licensed software.

Policy management for automated infrastructure provisioning - if your business units are driving you to faster provisioning of IT services and you need to control unauthorized infrastructure growth.

Business technology traceability - if you are embarking on one or more strategic IT initiatives and you need to ensure your current and planned IT environment supports (or understand how it impacts) your critical business systems.

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LEVERAGE THE POWER AND V ALUE OF FRAMEWORKS AND METHODOLOGIES All too often IT improvements are launched with great fanfare, only to fail miserably. Or they are initiated at a grassroots level and don't realize their full potential because they are not linked to a strategy that will engender executive (and financial) support. In both cases, tying your infrastructure sprawl management initiatives to your IT service management framework can reap significant rewards.

Many IT organizations have embraced industry-recognized frameworks such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library速 (ITIL速) framework. ITIL outlines a well-defined service delivery model that provides consistency across all phases of the service delivery life cycle. The benefit of linking your initiatives to ITIL or similar frameworks is that you can establish visibility to the business value of your effort.

Otherwise your initiatives may simply be viewed as just another unnecessary spending activity by the IT department. ITIL provides a structured approach to developing the linkages required to articulate value and obtain stakeholder buy-in.

Once the value proposition has been established ITIL provides the robust lifecycle management required to effectively develop, transition, operate and continuously improve your infrastructure management capability.

ITIL is simply a framework. In order to realize the full potential of your infrastructure management solution you need to extend ITIL with industry best practices (good practices in ITIL nomenclature). One area that can benefit from best practice extension is the correlation of IT infrastructure elements to mission critical business systems.

There are several enterprise-level tools on the market today that perform this task very well, but they are usually part of a large enterprise management platform. In order to approach this problem in a more cost effective and agile manner, look to methodologies, processes and tools that perform business technology traceability, which produces a clear picture of the relevance of your IT infrastructure to your key business objectives. These lightweight, subscription-based solutions enable a land and expand (aka "go and grow") strategy which gives you the flexibility to produce incremental, measurable results without potentially large, upfront licensing expenses.

BUILD A T RUSTED DATA SOURCE - A CRITICAL FIRST STEP IN ADDRESSING INFRASTRUCTURE SPRAWL In order to make accurate and timely decisions an enterprise must ensure that the data that represents its business is also accurate and timely. This is one of the most difficult obstacles facing enterprises today and will continue to worsen with the acceleration of data creation and proliferation. To take control of this problem you must take a disciplined approach to creating a trusted data source which represents the "atomiclevel" elements of your business.

The trusted data source is the foundation on which all aspects of your business and IT organization operates. The trusted data source for your IT environment enables different business functions within your enterprise:

"The CMDB is most powerful when it has a clear understanding of infrastructure components, application dependencies and service relationships," said Ronni Colville, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner, Inc. "Essential to that are solutions that automatically discover, model and maintain those relationships despite ongoing infrastructure changes.

This information can empower IT organizations to make more timely and accurate change and configuration decisions and deliver better service to the business."

Visibility - the ability to clearly see all the elements that comprise your IT delivery capability. This supports functions such as auditing and compliance which ensure your enterprise meets the everincreasing compliance requirements imposed by governance boards and government entities. Visibility robertkeahey.com

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should include all aspects of your IT infrastructure - compute, network, storage, applications, policies and security. Without the complete inventory of your environment you won't be able to create the linkages and relationships required to clearly understand how your IT assets support your business.

Line of Sight - allows you to see the relationships and dependencies between all the elements of your infrastructure and develop a clear understanding of which elements support your mission critical business applications. Creating a top-to-bottom view of your environment creates the foundation for business technology traceability, which in turn gives you a 3600 view of the relationships between your critical business systems and your IT infrastructure. This provides the starting point for improved asset management and decision making - resulting in an infrastructure aligned with your business strategy.

Operational Decision Making - provides the summarized information that supports your business and operations decisions. Once dependencies and relationships have been defined you can prioritize product development and investments to improve service delivery to your customers and internal lines of business.

Business Strategy Development - enables you to make informed decisions concerning your ability to enter new markets, engage in mergers and acquisitions and develop key alliances. Without the visibility, line of sight, and operational decision making capabilities provided by the trusted data source, these critical business decisions will be made with an incomplete or inaccurate view of your service delivery capability.

In addtion to supporting key business functions, the trusted data source must provide different views of your IT services model. IT operations will need a much deeper view of the data in order to manage day-to-day service delivery of your mission critical applications. However, senior management will normally require a much higher level, summarized view of the assets that comprise your service delivery capability.

The key to a successful framework based approach (such as ITIL) to IT service management is the development of an accurate and well-maintained configuration management data base (CMDB). As many enterprises strive to improve service delivery through an framework approach, they often fall short due to their inability to create a CMDB that accurately reflects the IT assets that comprise the service delivery infrastructure.

In the information technology environment the atomic data that makes up the trusted data source is usually housed in a CMDB which is part of a "home grown" system or an element of a large enterprise management framework. Sometimes the data is maintained as a single integrated data source, but more often is comprised of several data bases spread across multiple unconnected systems. In either of these deployment models how do you ensure that the data that is housed in these sources accurately reflects what is actually running in your data centers? Addressing this problem is the primary consideration when choosing your infrastructure sprawl management strategy.

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OVERCOME THE LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT METHODS AND TOOLS Very few IT environments have the luxury of a single, integrated architectural model. Most data center management systems are built from collection of tools that are loosely connected, providing a somewhat "federated", but often disjointed view of the IT infrastructure. Some of these tools provide a very detailed view of their particular domain, but provide limited visibility to other domains - even if they are part of the same vendor solution. In order to develop a complete picture of your IT infrastructure you must invest in expensive and long professional services or internal development projects to solve the disjointed federation problem. Or you can simply continue to use the multiple systems independently- a phenomenon known as "swivel chair management".

Either scenario results in unneeded IT expenditures.

Data center managers who have invested in large, legacy enterprise management systems are faced with another problem. While they often have a more complete and accurate view of their infrastructure, they are burdened with high licensing fees and are locked into the development cycles of the legacy provider. The result is fewer budget dollars for projects that yield higher returns on investment and loss of agility required to respond to rapidly changing business demands.

Many IT managers, faced with the improbable task of developing a clear picture of the IT resources under their oversight simply give up and decide to live with the problem, managing the risk and exposure on a "case-by-case" basis. This is due to the fact that they simply cannot afford - either in time or money - the effort required to create a baseline of their environment. Even if they are able to create a point-in-time snapshot, it will almost immediately be inaccurate as users who were once relegated to "looking into the glass house" can now create their own virtual resources without the oversight and control of the IT organization.

In order to overcome the problems of infrastructure sprawl, IT managers must look to new lightweight approaches to understanding and providing services in a mixed physical and virtual world. They must look beyond the development of more homegrown scripts and spreadsheets or the long and expensive development cycles associated with legacy enterprise management systems. The tools they require for the future must at a minimum have the following characteristics: Drop and go implementation - preferably via a "virtual appliance" model Seamless integration with and no disruption to existing systems management tools Data acquisition only through open, industry-standard methods and interfaces Open, extensible data model to allow the addition of new assets types and export of asset and configuration data Integrated workflow capability to control the discovery, rediscovery, and management of IT resources Integrated development environment to quickly and easily create value-added capabilities Scalability and extensibility to support hundreds of thousands of resource instances

MAXIMIZE THE VALUE OF YOUR SHRINKING IT BUDGET Obtaining a clear and accurate picture of your IT environment does not come without a cost. However, that cost should be in line with your overall IT budget and should not disproportionately outweigh costs associated with the development of mission critical business applications. As IT budgets continue to shrink IT managers are starting to look for ways to reduce their systems management expenditures. This, however is not an easy task:

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Legacy "lock-in" prevents many companies from abandoning their current systems management capabilities in favor of newer, more effective solutions. The cost to extricate the current system far outweighs the savings of the new system.

Substantial upfront licensing fees for large, single-vendor enterprise management solutions are simply beyond the spending capability of all but the very largest of enterprises.

Inflexible licensing models result in long-term commitment to single vendor solutions.

Open source is an attractive alternative to historical licensing models, but consumers must account for the full lifecycle (including migration) costs. If not correctly managed these can be significant.

Testing and implementation cycles for highly complex systems limit the introduction of new solutions into resource constrained environments.

High feature/function development costs prohibit the extension of existing tools to meet the demands associated with virtual and cloud computing.

To solve the growing problem of Infrastructure sprawl while dealing with the issue of continually shrinking budgets, the IT manager must look for solutions that provide the optimum balance of features at a price point that does not negatively impact the balance between systems management and mission critical application development. Solutions that satisfy this critical requirement must: Provide a balanced base system and open source delivery and licensing model. This provides the value of ongoing supplier enhancement with the creativity realized from community-based innovation.

Support subscription-based licensing models to allow expense forecasting and management by enterprises of all sizes.

Reduce testing, implementation and configuration to minimize upfront expenditures and accelerate "time to value".

Support land and expand strategies within IT environments - start small with no disruption and then expand to encompass larger portions of IT infrastructure in an orderly fashion.

Allow customization and enhancement through integrated development capabilities - eliminating the need for expensive professional services resources and long development cycles.

Without these capabilities, most infrastructure discovery and management tools simply will not be an option for most IT managers.

EXAMPLE ARCHITECTURE MODEL The following diagram represents a relationship model for a typical lightweight discovery and correlation environment. This architectural model could be represented by a collection of enterprise-level systems management and discovery tools. For example, the primary functions workflow, discovery, correlation and basic business technology traceability could be provided by tools such as SMARTSTM from EMC. However, few companies (especially small to medium businesses) can afford the level of investment required to implement a TM TM full-featured platform such as SMARTS. Other enterprise platforms such as HP OpenView , IBM Tivoli , CA Infrastructure ManagementTM and BMC AtriumTM offer robust integrated solutions (including CMDBs), but require commitment to a single platform strategy that few companies can afford.

For those companies who are seeking solutions for a lightweight approach (or have a basic enterprise systems management platform in place and want to augment it with lightweight tools), there are many good tools on the market and selection of the proper tool(s) for your environment will depend on several factors:

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Maturity and level of sophistication of your business strategy and planning process Maturity of your IT infrastructure and IT service management strategy Percentage of IT budget allocated to discovery and compliance Degree to which your organization is prepared for and willing to accept change Availability of development/test environment

Lightweight Architecture Model for Environment Discovery and Correlation

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SUMMARY Unless you act swiftly and decisively, infrastructure sprawl will continue to be part of your daily issues review.

Many IT managers will choose to deal with the problem by maintaining the status quo with their existing legacy systems management architectures and tools - hoping that the hype of virtualization and cloud computing will wane and give them time to "ride out the storm". Unfortunately, customer demands for new services that require timely, agile and cost effective deployment of new IT capabilities will force most IT managers out of their comfort zone.

Tackling infrastructure sprawl is not for the faint of heart, but developing a clear strategy coupled with proper planning and well-managed execution can produce significant improvement in your ability to understand and control your IT services landscape. But don't confuse infrastructure sprawl management with automation or you will end up applying the wrong approach and tools to the problem. Gain control first, then automate.

In order to address the problem of infrastructure sprawl you must start with a reliable view of your existing environment. Unfortunately most tools only give you a partial view, or those that give you a full view are prohibitively expensive to acquire and operate. And even if your enterprise has the financial wherewithal to pursue a large scale systems management platform, the time to value is often extremely long, negating the immediate benefits that could be realized from a shorter deployment cycle. To overcome these issues, look to lightweight tools that offer a good balance between traditional licensing strategies and subscription-based services, giving you more flexibility and growth options as your business changes.

The real value of a clear picture of your infrastructure comes from the linkages that can be established to your mission critical business strategies and supporting systems. But tackling this problem without a robust, yet simple to use methodology often produces less than optimal results. To ensure success, utilize the structure provided by industry-recognized frameworks such as ITIL, but leverage the agility and flexibility of methodologies such as business technology traceability.

Finally, maintain control of your environment. A baseline will give you tremendous insight into the utilization and business performance of your assets. But as soon as the baseline is complete it will be out of date. Therefore you must look to methodologies and tools that allow you to continually discover changes. Once these are in place you can then enjoy the benefits of automation - giving more control to your users and letting them leverage your IT infrastructure as a true business relevant asset.

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ABOUT ROBERTKEAHEY.COM Successfully identifying, analyzing and creating compelling value propositions for emerging technologies that drive both top and bottom line value for global enterprises of all sizes is Robert Keahey’s expertise.

Mr. Keahey, who holds an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3 Foundation certification, brings to his clients a successful track record of innovation, strategic technology and business planning and development, superior service delivery and operational know-how complimented by a variety of information technology industry experiences. He has a network into high level executives in the information technology industry and has partnered with key players such as Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, EMC and Oracle to develop industry leading capabilities. He also has relationships with numerous venture capital firms and has assisted in the evaluation, development and acceleration of the business plans of several of their portfolio companies.

Contact Robert Keahey via his website at www.robertkeahey.com

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